Quote:
Originally Posted by destroycreate
Moving on, the architecture of Pittsburgh looks pretty unique compared to many other cities in the Midwest. I feel like I'm seeing elements from New England and New York...very different from what I've seen in Chicago, St. Louis or Milwaukee.
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A. That's because Pittsburgh is not in the Midwest... though cities further downriver do have some architectural similarities (Wheeling, Cincinnati... and St. Louis).
B. You are not seeing elements of New York... and certainly not New England (a region that was an influence on the Great Lakes region). Pittsburgh's historical architectural and urban layout comes from the Philadelphia cultural hearth... you can see this style in much smaller cities across Southern PA and nearby areas of Maryland and West Virginia (Harrisburg, Cumberland, Hagerstown, Wheeling, etc.).
Quote:
Originally Posted by pdxtex
its clearly in the transition zone between, the south, lower midwest and outer east coast. does it align itself more with cleveland and ohio or the east side of pennsylvania? it doesnt seem like it was quite the draw for southern blacks seeking factory jobs during ww2 either, i dont know why that would be, probably the overall scale of the local economy. maybe steel work is a kind of good old boy network. dunno....
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Nobody in Pittsburgh considers themselves Midwestern... for one thing... the TOPOGRAPHY! The Midwest is an entirely different environment from what we're used to. We are essentially the only example of a major Appalachian metropolis.
Pittsburgh may be closer to Cleveland than the East Coast... and the two share some historical similarities with steel manufacturing and Eastern European immigration and late 20th century struggles... but the cityscapes are basically polar opposites (East Coast/Appalachian hybrid vs. archetypal Great Lakes). There is a strong relationship between the two... but Pittsburgh overwhelmingly looks eastward toward DC/Philly/NYC... and the numbers back that up in terms of migration flows. That said, Pittsburgh isn't exactly closely aligned with Philly or even Harrisburg either due to distance and Central PA's impenetrable ridge after impenetrable ridge (they might not be tall, but there's no way around them). Pittsburgh is quite a self-sufficient regional capital in a lot of ways.
One of my favorite anecdotal examples w/r/t regional identity is when Megabus first started in the U.S... they originally plugged Pittsburgh in to the Chicago/Midwest network... there was no ridership out of Pittsburgh going west. We were promptly dropped from the network... but when Megabus expanded a year later, they correctly connected us to East Coast cities. (A few years later with Megabus more established, service extended both directions out of Pittsburgh.)
I've never put any stock into the ChiPitts megapolitan concept... as if some loose sprawl around minor Ohio cities like Youngstown and Sandusky somehow makes Pittsburgh orbit around distant Chicago. There may be a development gap in the Appalachian ridges seperating Pittsburgh from the East Coast... but DC, a region now almost equivalent economically to Chicago, is little more than half the distance of Chicago.
As for the smallish Black population in Pittsburgh... the region is more like say... the Pacific Northwest in that respect. Check out a map and look at what's due south of Pittsburgh... sparsely populated Appalachian mountains and plateaus... regions that never had many plantations and thus few slaves. Lack of population and rail lines coming from the South into Pittsburgh limited the Black flow compared to other Northeastern/Midwestern cities.
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